Word: librettist
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...Moss Hart, "like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession." On the face of it, Playwright Hart has little to be humble about. As co-author of such comedy classics as The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can't Take It with You, as librettist of Lady in the Dark and director of My Fair Lady, he will hold top billing in the American popular theater for a long time to come. But he has not had a play of his own on Broadway since the earnest, charming Climate of Eden in 1952. (There were...
Richard Strauss completed his last opera, Capriccio, in 1941. but the world that he and co-Librettist Clemens Kraus invoked in their "conversation piece for music" was as remote in spirit from the chaos of a Bremen or a Mannheim as Strauss's Bavarian mountain retreat was from the final convulsions of the Third Reich. The subject is opera itself-the relative merits of words and music-and it might just as aptly have been summed up under the title Six Characters in Search of an Opera. In a rococo salon near Paris, the six main figures sit chatting...
...prefiguring the emotional insights of Otello, but it is also marred by trivia, such as a kind of witches' cancan in the first scene. The libretto (by Verdi, put into verse by Francesco Piave) dimly reflects some of the original's greatness, but it is far behind Librettist Arrigo Boito's Otello and Falstaff, and is essentially a choppy, ill-balanced synopsis. The Met's production, while brilliant in most respects, was faulted by some ludicrous details and a kind of Teutonic touch that is alien both to Verdi's Italian music and to Shakespeare...
...Maria Callas, Zinka Milanov, and Rudolph Bing together in one room and you'll have the situation that forms the basis for Mozart's charming little comic opera, The Impresario. The petty jealousies and bickerings detailed by Mozart and his librettist strike home today just as well as they...
...theater. Producer Merrick (nicknamed "The Abominable Showman" by Broadway wags) need not have troubled. Either as drama or as music, Maria Golovin (first performed in Brussels last summer) is something of a disappointment. The plot is built on a theme that seems to have an obsessive fascination for Composer-Librettist Menotti: the maimed (in this case blinded) hero who is loved and finally destroyed by a beautiful woman. "I'm apt," says Menotti, "to express myself as a spiritually crippled person...